344: BAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE natural, and, if I may so speak, topographical, history 

 of the Clack Malloch, including, of course, its zoology and 

 botany, with notes of those atmospheric effects on the tides, 

 and of that stability for ages of the existing sea-level, which 

 it indicates, would of itself form one very interesting chap- 

 ter : its geological history would furnish another. It would 

 probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence and became auto- 

 biographical, first of a feverish dream of intense molten heat 

 and overpowering pressure j and then of a busy time, in which 

 the free molecules, as at once the materials and the artizans 

 of the mass, began to build, each according to its nature, 

 under the superintendence of a curious chemistry, here form- 

 ing sheets of black mica, there rhombs of a dark-green horn- 

 blende and a flesh-coloured feldspar, yonder amorphous masses 

 of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at length, 

 when the slow process was over, and the entire space had 

 been occupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the 

 red fiery twilight of the dream deepened into more than mid- 

 nigh D gloom, and a chill unconscious night descended on the 

 sleeper. The vast Palaeozoic period passes by, the scarce 

 less protracted Secondary ages come to a close, the Eocene, 

 Miocene, Pliocene epochs are ushered in and terminate, - 

 races begin and end, families and orders are born and die ; 



